michigan informatics
Entering Fields
Although Access does not require it, it is common practice for field names to contain no spaces and begin with a lower case letter. It is important for your field names to be short, meaningful and easy to read. Here are some examples of good field names: firstName, middleInitial, lastName
To enter fields in your table, fill in the Field Name (1) and the Data Type (2) for each field. The field Description is optional.
Each field in an Access table is of a particular data type. This defines the type of data that can be stored in it.
The participants table contains basic contact information for participants in our sample study: salutation, first name, middle initial, last name, street address 1, street address 2, city, state, zip, phone and birth date. The ID field is defined as the Primary Key for this table (note the key symbol beside it) (3). Primary keys are unique identifiers for each record in the table. We could not use lastName as the Primary Key because there might be more than one person with the same last name. The Primary Key is always a field that contains a unique value for each record. To assign a primary key to a field, right-mouse click on the left-most cell in the field row and select Primary Key.
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